


Dolls

by dreamsofghostsandstars



Series: The Fallen [1]
Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ancient Egyptian Deities, Angels, Angst, Consent Issues, Dark, Demons, Dysfunctional Relationships, Gaslamp Fantasy, Ghosts, Gothic, Horror, Imperfect Gods, Implied Relationships, Judeo-Christian Mythology, Mental Instability, Multi, Reincarnation, Religion, Unreliable Narrator, Vampires, Variations on Ancient Egyptian Religion, Victorian, Witchcraft, gothic horror, possible blasphemy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-18
Updated: 2017-03-23
Packaged: 2018-09-18 07:51:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 19,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9375245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamsofghostsandstars/pseuds/dreamsofghostsandstars
Summary: APenny Dreadfulseason 2 AU, canon-divergent from the end of season 1. Millennia ago, after the rebelling angels were cast out of Heaven, Nephthys betrayed her lover Amunet to the Master in Hell. Called back to the mortal plane by Victor's experiments and psychically melded to a once-human host, she seeks to atone for her crimes by creating an immortal army to protect Vanessa Ives. Meanwhile, Vanessa struggles to maintain her faith, the witches plot against one another as well as Vanessa, and Dorian's secret could catalyze the apocalypse.Primarily told from Lily's POV, with a prelude (Hecate), an interlude (Vanessa), and a postlude (Dracula) by others.





	1. Prelude

**Author's Note:**

> While I loved season 2's go-for-broke ambience in general and the unrestrained villainy of Evelyn Poole in particular, I am still myself, and so I had to be unhappy. I found serious flaws in its basic continuity, plot cohesion, and character development, all of which I have attempted to address here.
> 
> With regard to basic continuity: First, I wanted to create a simple, serviceable explanation for Ethan's lycanthropy. What I came up with is not particularly deep or exciting, but it is, hopefully, a decent hand-wave for something that became quite convoluted on the show. Second, the strictures of Vanessa's religion seem to come and go at random in canon. I felt that her faith would have more of an impact on her decisions-- that, at some point, she would refuse to use a spell, or that she would attempt to "starve" her clairvoyant senses, and that it would, inevitably, change the course of everyone's lives. Third, she's described herself as a whole slew of entities in the show, including as something "much older" than Amunet in "Séance"; in "Memento Mori," Lyle chalks her many names up to their being synonyms for one evil goddess, but I took the step of assuming that people even within the same religion had, in their stories, divided the same goddess into different entities, both for easier comprehension and to exemplify the classic Madonna/whore complex. Vanessa is, indeed, much older than the concept of the specific goddess Amunet; however, she is as much Amunet as she is Isis or Naunet or Hathor (or Innana or Ereshkigal, to put her into a different context).
> 
> In terms of plot cohesion, I felt that Lily, Victor, Dorian, and John Clare's storylines spun too far outside Vanessa's orbit in the second and third seasons. Making Lily Vanessa's ancient lover/betrayer was a way to bring Victor and his creatures back into the fold. It also allowed Lily to focus her general misandry on more specific targets (Vanessa's pursuers), which, IMO, lent itself to more exciting storytelling. Unlike in the show, Dorian doesn't appear in this story until he has a bearing on the main plot, and his secret calls back to the effects their sexual encounter had on Vanessa in season 1.
> 
> As for character development: Leaving aside the problems made obvious by a description of the other issues, I strongly disliked both Vanessa and John Clare's arcs in season 2. For me, Vanessa's decision to "go away from God forever" needed to lead up to something stronger than the act of burning a crucifix in a fireplace. It needed to be something that would irreversibly change both Vanessa herself and the entire cosmos. Whereas, in canon, she starts season 2 pious and strong, and ends rather broken and mildly rebellious, I have her start pious and weak, go through a shattering experience at the midpoint, and emerge strong and defiant of any other entity's control. Or, at least that was my intention.
> 
> John Clare's canon arc had the problem of not fitting with his self-realization, as seen in "Grand Guignol," that his demands for a mate are futile, and that he cannot force true love on a woman. As a result, here he's attempting to trick Lily into accepting him in a different role: Her brother. Of course, trickery is trickery, and he's not ready for her games.
> 
> YMMV on whether any of this is an improvement over the canon version, one more mediocre fic based on a questionable concept, or just a Product of a Deranged Mind.™️ Even if it's the latter, I feel that this show's characters are appropriate outlets, and that, if they could, they would agree with that assessment.

**The floor** around the corpses was clean, only a little blood seeping out onto the marble tiles. Evelyn considered it beneath her dignity to have to deal, in what passed for a witch’s leisure time, with the vulgar wastes that so many humans expelled in their death throes. The girls underwent their death by poison in another room, moments before being carried here to have their throats slit, very carefully, above the deep tub.

Hecate had been cleaning up Evelyn’s poison rooms in countries around the world since she was eight years old, and, after a century, she had perfected the lowly arts of scraping and sluicing. She didn’t even need to wash her hands. Not a drop of the vileness had splattered on them.

She changed clothes anyway, not because she saw any filth on them, but because she thought she could still catch a whiff of the foul air when the fabric moved. Like all her coven clothes, this one was influenced by Evelyn’s favorite styles of history, with little input from the current world. Part of Hecate disdained this as proof of Evelyn’s creeping obsoleteness; part of her acknowledged that, at least, the loose, high-waisted gowns were more comfortable for time at home than the stiff molds in which most modern women lived their lives.

Hecate chose her position in the room carefully. Should she drape herself across the couch, as though she knew her true position in the coven to be beyond question, or should she stand front and center, separating Evelyn from all the simpering fools who wanted to snatch Hecate’s birthright from her? In the end, she decided to wait at the doorway of the parlor; although a long, beautifully twisted staircase separated the parlor from Evelyn’s private bath, no one in the castle was stupid enough to think that Evelyn would forgive any intruder she caught waiting anywhere on the trail to her refuge.

From her place in the parlor she could see up one turn of the corkscrew stairs, dressed in skulls and carved with demons. The candelabrum of the stairwell was a chandelier of bones, lit with an extravagance of candles.

When Hecate took Evelyn’s place, she would get rid of those grisly medieval mementos. Lucifer was a being of spirit, not flesh or blood or bone; he worked through such materials only to impact the material world. _If_ Hecate lived on Earth at all after the apocalypse, _if_ she did not make herself his queen over the new Hell in Heaven, she would at least live as something more than a carrion-picking jackal.

Evelyn appeared, her stride deceptively languid, in a green robe of modern printed silk. _“And the autumn leaves that fall from the trees/Are green, and spring up/ Again,”_ Hecate had heard, in Evelyn’s rich voice, floating from the bathroom.

_Oh, mother. Pray you spring up soon, or it will be too late,_ she thought. _How many more chances will the Master give you?_

At least one, apparently. One more chance to capture the Miss Vanessa Ives that Hecate had heard so much about over the years. It amused Hecate, to see her mother floundering so in her attempts to sacrifice one lone witch who had hamstrung her own magic by her belief in the anemic rites of the Christian god, but she wouldn’t say it, not yet. Not until she could say it over the last wheezing breath of Evelyn’s shriveled husk.

Evelyn wore nothing under her robe, Hecate could tell. She wondered if she would be called on to service their leader, or if someone else would. _Perhaps the Master doesn’t pay you as much attention as you wish, Mother,_ she thought spitefully. Hecate hoped it was her. She would taste the slippery secretions from Evelyn’s cunt and think of the day when she tasted victory.

But it wouldn’t do to be caught gathering wool. She dipped her head, just less than she knew the other girls did, and stood at attention. Apparently Evelyn still knew that her focus had wandered; a look as scathing as a thousand curses passed over her.

Evelyn wouldn’t kill her, though, not for as long as Hecate was her most capable acolyte, not for so long as the younger witch held enough of the Master’s favor. And Hecate, having grown up under the vicious tutelage of Evelyn Poole— Evelyn Livingston, when Hecate had been a child—, excelled at currying favor.

“Miss Ives, I think we will find, is not so resistant to the Master’s charms as she claims,” Evelyn was saying. “She let him between her legs before, after all, by her own choice; why wouldn't she let him into her heart? No, she merely needs to be… persuaded.” Her right index finger twitched faintly, as it did when Evelyn thought of violence. Hecate refused to let her eyes be drawn toward it and its deadly ring.

“You tried persuasion by threat on the moors, though, didn’t you, Mother?” Hecate asked. It still smarted, the insult of being left out of that mission. She supposed that Evelyn had feared being surpassed, and guessed that she was only here now due to the old hag’s desperation.

Evelyn accepted the insult’s veneer of strategizing. “Miss Ives cannot be simply ‘threatened.’ I believe that she can only be seduced. Of course, seduction will be a good deal easier when she’s driven mad with fear.” Evelyn glanced at an arrangement of bones. “Her own fears, not just fear of us. Every time that we appear is a chance that she will see the power that she denies herself. We will show ourselves to her when she wakes, when she sleeps, when she walks, when she rests, when she runs, when she hides. She will lose more and more of the things that make this world defending to her. And when she knows that none of it was ever worth the trouble of her grief, then she will accept her destiny as our Master’s love.”

“We are to follow her and harass her?” asked Hecate, not adding how common it sounded. Surely even the humblest servants of their Master should not have to lower themselves to turn into rabble and heckle his mark.

“Her, her friends, perhaps all of London by the time this is over. Perhaps the entire world.”

“When do we start?” asked one of the other witches, an insipid creature named Claudette, who had more nerve than sense. Hecate would have considered her brave, except that Claudette was to stupid to know when she rushed into danger.

Evelyn twisted the ring, a sure sign that she was relishing her thoughts. She never did it when she was frightened, as— though she would no doubt deny it— Hecate had seen her become after her audiences with their Master.

“What other time is there?” she said. “Now, of course.”


	2. The Storm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The combination of an old demon and a recently-resurrected woman create a formidable opponent to Vanessa's pursuer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "She couldn't breathe" is one of the most heartbreaking lines I have ever written. Definitely adding "Angst" to this work's tags.

**For a** moment, all the millennia of rejoicing and wandering disappeared, and Nephthys, the betrayer, forever atoning for her sins to the Mother of more than human words could ever say, was a child-god again, innocent as anyone cold be in the moment of creation. Water boiled around her, tingling with the lightning that had fertilized it; she reached her hand upward and felt life, life, _life,_ until, as her fingers breached the surface of the water, the essence of life faded, and she realized the reality.

The water was contaminated, not by anything that could harm her— and what was she, now? What shell did she carry on her soul?—, but by foul chemicals, foreign to her experience. Perhaps they sullied her now, or perhaps they strengthened the alloy; only time would tell. This body had been dead. She had been dead. No, not herself, not—

She was someone else. Brona Croft. “It means sadness,” she recalled saying of the name, to a man who she recalled with a fondness she could not place, in this lifetime, to any other. Her mind reeled, sick in the soup of preserving poisons and memories and feelings, the physical and mental blending together, but it wouldn’t become better for her lying about waiting on the men nearby to help her. It never did. How did she even know there were men nearby? Why could she hear their breathing so clearly through the water, how could she even tell that one was like her, his heart beating too slowly and his flesh producing too little warmth?

She stood, though still confused. Nephthys had dwelt in hundreds of human bodies, merging with her hosts from the time of their childhoods; on occasion, she had remembered a flash from a past life. But never had she lived in an adult body, accustomed to the thoughts of the woman who had lived in it for… thirty-one years, she knew, and full of that woman’s feelings, perhaps even her soul. She wondered if, as with her child-hosts, they would eventually become entwined until death, the vines of one rooted too deeply into the other to be separated by anything else.

_I must find her,_ she thought, even as the two men stared at her naked body and the cool air soaked up the steam that she might have pretended obscured her nudity. All those lifetimes, and she still hadn’t atoned for her betrayal of the Mother to the serpent. _Amunet, Lilith, Hella, Macha, Mara…_ Nepthys never called her Isis or Eve or any of the names of women treated more kindly in the words of men. Let their speech be as hard as their actions; she had had enough of their deceptions.

Now the Mother would need her as much as ever, for Nephthys could sense the awakening of a coven. They always rose to greater heights of magic when they believed their quarry was near, and they were seldom wrong. It might be a blessing, to have been reborn into this strange body— strange and powerful, she could feel it; death flowed from it, but not a drop ran the other way. If she had been reborn as an infant, it would have taken years to be of any help. Now, she might manage within weeks, days, if necessary.

She stared down at the men without apology. No doubt they would take it for shock or slowness; she would not degrade herself by feigning shame in the body that they had stripped and kept watch over. She could imagine it, her clothes being cut away, the knives sinking into her flesh, the fingers tracing what would have been sensitive skin, had she still been alive. _A pillow over her face, her painful breaths rendered utterly impossible, while she resisted weakly out of loyalty to her faith and her sheer will to live, yet, in a final sin, was relieved that her misery on Earth would finally end,_ the memory came, and she recognized one of the men as Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the man who had murdered her. Brona? The woman who had once lived in this body, and might still.

Nephthys had learned all the trickery of the men she so despised. It was effortless for her to remain shivering and mute while the men talked about her; while they dressed her in an inadequate shirt that barely colored the russet curls at her pubis and an open-hanging, rough brown robe; while they talked about her future as a child would plan a doll’s weddings and tea parties. Caliban, the immortal, who was thinking of renaming himself John Clare after a poet, despised Victor’s “steel-hearted city” and praised his “sister”’s beauty in a rather envious, not to mention lustful, tone. “I can see that the cost to your firstborn was worthwhile to you, Father,” he spat, while looking at a finger that had caressed her hair as though he thought it might now be a sacred relic. He considered her resurrection “futile,” but seemed to have no intention of leaving her side: “What is Frankenstein without his creature?”

The doctor seemed less interested in poetry and more interested in flesh, although she doubted he’d be willing to admit it. He looked eagerly enough at her exposed skin, then looked away with a prudish expression once he’d seen enough to commit to memories. Nephthys let him guide her into a chair and hand-feed her bread. After a moment, with a questioning look, she took the bread into her own hand. He allowed it.

“Who— am— I?” she asked, as though it were hard for her to think of each word in succession.

He started, but recovered. “Lily. Your name is Lily, the flower of rebirth and resurrection.” He hesitated. “You are my second cousin, Lily Frankenstein. You were here to visit me in London, and you suffered a carriage accident. You required multiple surgeries and exhibit severe amnesia.”

_Lily._ She wondered if she should accept the name. Somewhere, in the back of her mind, she remembered saying, _"It means sadness,"_ and, for a moment, she lost track of all the personalities and meanings and memories.

“That makes me sad,” she said. “Why should a flower make me sad?”

The doctor shrugged. “I don’t know.” Her mind cleared, and she remembered the original meaning of Brona’s past name. The brilliance of Victor’s blue eyes, as she absorbed her surroundings in every sharp detail, seemed made for cruel sarcasm, but then, she supposed he’d have to be utterly humorless to not appreciate the dramatic irony he imagined in this situation.

Of course, she was the one who actually knew things the others did not. She would not forget that power.

“Family?” she asked, breathless. Her robe fell a bit more open; Victor stared at the curve of her breast and reached for it, then turned his hand aside to close the robe instead.

“I’m afraid both our parents have passed away, and we were only children,” he said. “We mostly had each other—and your brother, John—“ this sounded painful for him, “growing up, and I suppose we mostly have each other now.”

“My brother, what is… what is wrong with him?” If the doctor gave away John’s secrets, he might give away her own.

Victor and John seemed to have thought out their story. “A house fire, when we were children. It’s a miracle he’s alive.”

She leant on him, clutching him not too tightly, but as a desperate child might. “Cousin, help me. I am at your mercy.” She made sure to give her voice just a hint of an added rasp. It seemed to aid matters that this body wanted to spend twice as much breath as necessary on each word anyway.

“I will,” he promised, stroking her scalp gently. Several times, his fingers almost— _almost_ — slid under the lapels of her robe at the back of her neck, but he restrained himself. “Do you remember the thunderstorms when we were little? Um— no, of course not. You were always afraid of them. You said it sounded like the end of the world.” _Or its beginning,_ thought Lily. _How much difference will there be?_ “So you’d run through the house, tiptoeing to keep from waking up Father, and then you’d climb into my bed and cling to me until the storm was passed.” He drew back a little, and looked at her with a gentler look in his eyes, although that hard brilliance still lurked behind it, ready to bloom. “I will protect you, Lily. You have my word.”

She still clung to his arms with a light grip. He pried her fingers loose and began rummaging around his laboratory. It really was fascinating, all the wizardry he had managed to work with an alchemist’s tools and a scientist’s ingredients, and, she supposed, the aid of natural lightning. A thought occurred to her, of how she could save the Mother from the witches and their dreadful dolls. Surely those hidebound slaves of Lucifer would have no magic fresh and potent enough to counter this.

But she couldn’t place the items he produced, when he returned from the shelves, as ingredients in his preservative soup, and she couldn’t guess what they might have to do with immortality. She supposed she’d find out soon enough. He fetched a bowl of water as well, and a towel, and told her to sit in the chair and tilt her head back.

“Cousin?” she asked, with an added tremble. “Why— why did you put my head in the water?”

“I’m going to bleach your hair,” he said. His voice was almost toneless. Her scalp tingled and itched from whatever he had poured into the water. She supposed that she would have to learn all of it, every ingredient in every bottle in this overstuffed attic, if she were to know which she needed for her plans.

_He stole this from us,_ she thought. _No man should bear life like this._ The rage swelled inside her, so that it seemed it must burst out, but he didn’t notice.

“Why?” she asked, as though she were just a curious girl and not an outraged goddess, scarred by centuries of battle with the men who wanted to use her mistress’s womb to bear their plans.

“I’ve always admired fair-haired women. They seem… angelic, I suppose.”

“You’re making me into an angel!” she crowed, then added, with a crestfallen pout, “Or perhaps just the cousin you always wanted.”

“I am making you,” he said, “perfect.”

“Was I bad when we were children, Victor?”

He laughed, faintly. No doubt he was mocking the simple mind of his amnesiac patient, and no doubt he had spent his whole life wishing for a woman as easy to transform. “No, Lily, you were good. But children grow up, and no one stays pure forever.”

“You became yourself.” He was combing her hair. It relieved some of the discomfort in her scalp. “You are good, Lily. And you are going to be an angel.”

The irony of his obsession with angels amused her. She could easily have laughed, but then, she could also have easily drowned Victor Frankenstein in his own “womb” and torn this building down to its foundations. Neither action would forward her new plan.

“Will you bleach all my hair, Victor?” she asked innocently.

That made his careful fingers twitch. “I think not. These chemicals have the potential to be dangerous when used incorrectly.”

“Oh,” she said, “but I’m sure you know how. I know I’m safe with you, Victor. I know I’ll always be safe with you.”

**He expected** her to be an idiot.

No, not in the sense that she’d never be able to make conversation, or that she’d never learn how to cook a meal— he seemed surprised when she cooked him a meal of poached eggs, only three days after her rebirth, but he accepted her claim that it was coming back to her the way that speech had. It was a lack of dreams, not skill, that he imagined in her. When she asked if she could see the people outside, he assured her that they were not worth seeing, and she thought, looking into his eyes, that he believed it, that he thought she would be better off unsullied by the sight of the drunkards, pickpockets, opium addicts, gamblers, prostitutes, and wheezing factory workers who populated the Shad Thames.

Lily wondered if any of the things that she had seen would have raised his hair. He was a brave boy, this one. Her affection toward him surprised her. She wasn’t accustomed to repaying men with love for the scraps they threw the world. She had yet to sense Brona as a discrete presence; had begun to wonder if that soul had even been recalled to its old body; and now suspected that this was how it would begin to manifest. How much of Brona’s personality had already begun to bleed through, how much of the colors remaining were the goddess’s own?

Victor was often gone in the day, the other— who now styled himself John Clare, and read maudlin poems by his namesake— for even longer hours. He seemed not to consider himself a fit teacher, with which she must concur, but he thought it was good for her, to hear the words that had “inspired them both” in their youth. It amused her to learn that their childhood bond had been solidified by an adolescent obsession with Romantic poetry. He must have been almost as blind as Victor, to think her moved by his ability to quote other men’s whining verses. Yet she let him speak, for in the belief that a woman cared lay every man’s weakness.

“It must be quite exciting for you,” she said, “to go out and to work in a store of strange people coming and going all the time. What faces they must make, when they see all the wax people staring back at them!”

“It is lonely,” he confessed. “Like our friend the poet, I am strange, outcast, unworthy in the eyes of all save my family, and even here I find that… I long for a time when we could look at one another and know that we remembered the same game, the same joke, the same present unwrapped at Christmastime.” He set down the soup that she had made them, too hot for any human to drink, but harmless to the resurrected. Victor was on call with his erratic employers from the West End. “I do not say this to make you feel guilty, sister,” he said, tracing her face with a big hand. “I speak only so that we can share our feelings again. And perhaps such a time never truly existed. Perhaps it can only live in our imagination, when we cannot have it.”

“What was our cousin like?” she asked.

He looked confused. No wonder— she doubted that his guess would be as close as her own. “Ah— he was— uh, bookish. Very interested in science and poetry both. A fine student, but an asthmatic. We were always concerned for his health.”

“Was he always so fatherlike?”

“Fatherlike?” From her perch a few feet away, she could taste the bitterness of his smile. “Is he that?”

“Yes. More so than a cousin. He won’t let me go out, not even in the building. He says it’s dangerous, but I can’t believe it’s that frightful. You and he wander in at all hours, and your pockets aren’t picked. Why does he assume every man in this city would make greater efforts for my—“ she dipped her head— “my virtue?”

“I don’t know,” John said. “I have… never seen him act so.”

“Where does he go, do you suppose?” Lily mused. “These rich people that he visits, what do you think is wrong with them?” _What are his real services to them? Is he putting gods in immortal bodies by plan or by happenstance? Why are you nothing more than a man inside a modern demon’s shell?_

“I don’t know that there’s anything wrong with them,” John said, “save sadness.” He looked ahead at his white hands. “If I tell you something, will you… not tell our cousin?”

“Of course,” Lily agreed. “Terrible as it sounds, sometimes he hardly even feels like my cousin. Oh! That sounded so ungrateful. But go ahead, brother, you were going to make some dark and terrible confession.”

“I track him, sometimes,” admitted John. “I know who the strange people are, the ones who call on him at odd hours, and I’ve even gotten to know one, although she just thinks I’m another charity case taking soup at her kitchen. They are… different. Not necessarily better or worse than other people, but different.” He smiled. “I feel that Miss Ives is a creature spun from the essence of poems. Her soul could fuel the writing of a hundred classics. And yet she’s sad, so sad. She feels that God’s abandoned her, or she’s abandoned God, or some such.” John laughed. “Did you know, she gave me a dance lesson in her soup kitchen? It must have hurt her feet, she complained about her shoes, but she cares. She’s a kind woman.”

_Miss Ives? Where do I know Miss Ives?_ It had to be Brona, an angrier, sharper Brona than she was used to, recoiling at the presence of someone who was better than her and didn’t have a right to be. Jealousy and grief and anger and resentment and a feverish confusion, and she slapped the handsome lover— Ethan— and was alone, coughing and alone; her handkerchief was soaked through and she had fallen to her knees while crowds bustled past and she was alone; she lay, sweating and rattling from her chest in her bed, and Ethan was there, but she and God had abandoned each other and she still hated him and she could not be forgiven unless she could repent and so she would be alone again; the demons drained her, feeding on her eternally without killing her, and there was no pity in their touch and she was alone, alone in Hell—.

Of a sudden, she remembered everything, Brona’s sorry life and sorrier afterlife. For thirty years the woman’s existence had been gnawed away by a would-be husband, a mother who yielded to men and the Bible, industrialists, and johns; for three weeks it had been feasted upon by the Master in Hell and all his underlings, who preyed on the legions not deemed fit for Heaven.

She remembered, amid it all, Ethan Chandler, the man with the strange marks on his hands when they met and always the faint scent of the outdoors clinging to him, a sharpshooter and drifter and drinker, kind to Brona, yet always a little to vague in his self-denunciations. _The wolf? Has that curse awakened again?_ she thought, and, _Of course, to be honest, I’d not have shared my worst stories with him either. Enough that he knew what I did tell him._ That was Brona bleeding through, without a doubt. Lily looked at the flesh of one of her white hands and wondered how much of it she could truly call her own. It seemed, absurdly, that she ought to have felt dizzy; but this immortal body did not respond as it should to shocks of the soul.

“I think I could do with a kind woman to give me lessons,” Lily said. “Do you think that you could introduce us?” John hesitated, so she simpered a little, tucking her head, and smiling shyly. He smiled back. _So it’s the damsel you admire. I thought as much._ “Please, brother. I fear the results of an education solely by our cousin.”

“I— I will try,” said John nervously. “Mind, I have— never been good with such requests, but I will see what I can do.”

**It was** a shame that Victor didn’t keep better notes on his process. Indeed, Lily suspected that he must have made a practice of burning them, once he had committed their contents to memory. Perhaps it was a rare sign of responsibility on his part, but it was an inconvenience to her. It meant that she couldn’t simply pocket his papers, strangle him along with her budding affections, and leave the entire tenement as one more heap of rubble behind her while she went on her way.

On the other hand, this made for a most fitting punishment. _Treachery was always what you did best, wasn’t it, Nephthys?_ It was a long, painful game, allaying Victor’s suspicions while asking coy questions and piecing together what she could from the notes he’d left intact, blushing and giggling and being so careful not to leave even the tiniest smudge on his papers. He looked so unimportant, yet, when she hovered her hands above his words on a page, she felt a tingling of hope greater than she had felt in centuries. An immortal army that she could raise, without recourse to any male entity or forcing the Mother to make up the loss somewhere else: At last she could atone for her crime. At last she could be free.

Sometimes, she looked into his blue eyes, and she felt a softening, not as Brona had toward Ethan, but more as she had toward Sarah. Victor seemed a child; watching the glow that crept more strongly into his face as the days passed, like a sunrise spreading above the horizon, she wondered if some great part of him had been reborn with her. It was preposterous, traitorous— not that that was anything new to her—, dangerous to think such things. Victor was not a child; he was a man, an animal, a creature that would use the Mother, and all mothers, as he wished and think nothing of their concerns. Brona’s story was just one more note in an endless scroll of evidence against the male sex.

“I’m going out tomorrow,” she said at the door to his room, adding a few bites of her lips, “unless you object, of course.” She smiled and advanced a few slow steps. “John is taking me to meet one of the nice ladies who volunteers with the poor in the neighborhood. I’ve been so lonely for a woman to talk about womanly things with.”

Victor didn’t like it, she could tell, but he couldn’t come up with grounds to deny that it was a reasonable wish. “Ah— yes, well, I hope you have a delightful conversation.”

“I hope to,” she said. I hope that Miss Ives can lead me to the wolf, and through him, to the Mother. “Victor?”

“Yes?”

“Is it— is it strange, my being here?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve been giving me the strangest looks for days now. I don’t understand. Am I in your way?”

His expression melted. “No, Lily. I can’t imagine that anyone would ever say that of you.”

“But you did research, before I came. Have you stopped your research because of me, is that it? Are you afraid that your medical experiments will be too much for my nerves?”

“I—.” He hesitated. “Lily, my research involved a great deal of anatomical study. Dissections, even, although I could do most of those in an old stable where I used to work. The sight, let alone the smell, is not for the faint of heart.”

_It can hardly be much worse than stench of the river, _she thought, but she sat on his bed and said instead, “I— perhaps I was faint before, but whatever made me so, I am strong now, strong from re-learning how to live surrounded by all this knowledge. I’ve looked over your drawings of muscles and arteries all sliced open and gruesome,” and here she tittered just a little. “I can’t pretend that I knew what it was all about; if I ever understood your research, that hasn’t come back to me. But it didn’t frighten me. I can’t be afraid with you here. Wasn’t it that way when I was little?”__

__“Yes,” he said, the warmth in his eyes changing to a blaze._ _

__“So you see, you must continue your research. I can’t be frightened by it, and I won’t be the cause of your displeasure with me.”_ _

__“Lily, I am not displeased with you.” His voice was thick. _The fool,_ she thought, but her feelings screamed, _The child.__ _

__“What are you, then, cousin?” she whispered. “You stare at me all the time, as though waiting for me to make some idiot’s mistake. You don’t want anyone to see me. Am I so dreadful, so wrong, since my accident?”_ _

__“No, Lily.” He pursed his lips. “There is nothing wrong with you.”_ _

__She snuggled close to him and pulled him down onto the bed. “Do you still love me, then?”_ _

__“Of course,” he answered, his voice stiff._ _

__She took one of his hands in hers and began moving it, very slowly, toward her. His breath hissed out when he realized that she was guiding it through the slit in her gown, and came back in when his hands surrounded the dome of her right breast._ _

__She reached up to kiss him, lightly, with all a virgin’s uncertainty. He kissed her back, awkward but eager. _You deserve this,_ she thought. _You shall atone for your treachery with treachery, and not escape your nature for as long as the world endures.__ _

__She made sure to moan, just a little, when he squeezed both her breasts, even though it was from the wrong angle and hurt more than it pleased her. _It’s not like I don’t have plenty of experience._ She couldn’t tell if the thought came from Brona or Nephthys. Perhaps there was no separating them, while this body… endured._ _

__She wasn’t ready yet, wasn’t wet enough, but she wanted it over with and their bargain sealed _(Thinking like a whore, aren’t you?)_ , and, as she had admitted to herself, she deserved this. If she was right about Victor, the brilliant anatomist wouldn’t be able to tell the difference._ _

__Apparently she was right about Victor. He readily climbed atop her and pressed inside, looking into her eyes as though he thought he could be the first man to see all of Heaven. He’d probably consider the topic above his colleagues’ heads if he were, he’d never wind up sending in the paper._ _

__She disguised a wince as a shudder of pleasure, and ran her fingers underneath his shirt, along his spine, as if she weren’t feeling enough of him already. The light, teasing touches seemed to bring him closer; he grunted rather shrilly as he moved, and then cried out in an almost feminine manner. If he noticed her comparable quiet, it didn’t bother him. Her affection for him shriveled a bit under the hot light of knowledge._ _

__“Cousin,” she said, “promise me that we will always be together?”_ _

__“Of course,” he said._ _

__“And you’ll bring back your research here, and keep doing the things that you have to do, because I have to be with _you,_ and I’m so worried that I’m keeping you from being you?”_ _

__He kissed the top of her head. “Of course, Lily. I’ll start up again tomorrow.”_ _

__**Miss Ives** was the Mother._ _

__For all her extraordinary strength and all this body’s resiliency, Lily nearly toppled over when she saw her outside the soup kitchen. The Mother looked equally stunned, was maybe more, in her frail human body. She licked her lips and opened her mouth to speak, before taking off her gloves and extending a hand. For the Mother, Lily knew, the gloves were like a blindfold. The Mother wanted to know what Lily was._ _

__It must be even more bizarre for her— Vanessa, Lily decided, sounded like an acceptable name— than for Lily. After all, Vanessa would not only be sensing the presence of Nephthys, but be looking at the face of the resurrected Brona Croft._ _

__Lily wished that she could convey all her plans and all her loyalties to Vanessa in the brief touch of their hands. If Vanessa had fully tapped the well of her powers, she could have. But Vanessa was clearly practicing some game of self-restraint. The Mother had always been too afraid of herself. Otherwise, thought Lily, she would have seized Heaven in the war, and the god who now reigned there would instead be consigned to die again and again, lost on a gray and dirty sea of humanity._ _

__She should have killed the man-god. She should have killed all of them. Of course, she should have killed Nephthys, too._ _

__“You’ve met,” John said, when the two women clasped hands wordlessly, their eyes locking. He sounded oddly betrayed._ _

__“We have,” Lily agreed. “It is a long story, and one I trust you will not tell our creator.”_ _

__He hadn't thought she knew. Well, perhaps his idiocy would make him useful at some point. “I know what he did. I know what we both are. And I know why _your_ Miss Ives”— how dare he, how _dare_ he think that he could befriend Vanessa behind her back— “is not afraid of either of us.” She and Vanessa had yet to cease gazing at one another, although the Mother, by that trick she had always had, managed to encompass John Clare as well in her stare. _She is without limits. No, she only appears to be, like any good and devoted mother.__ _

__“Why did you deceive us?” asked John. He still sounded as though she had planned all of this as an affront to him._ _

__“Because I know,” said Lily, leaning in closer to Vanessa, so that she could smell her expensive perfume and delicate human skin, “what threatens this good, kind lady. Monsters hunt her, and only monsters can destroy them.”_ _

__“No,” Vanessa interrupted. “God will protect me.”_ _

__“As he has all these millennia?” Lily drew back. “Tell me, do you still draw the scorpion, or have you not had need of it since last I saw you?”_ _

__Vanessa weaved a little on her feet. “All have sinned; all have fallen short. God forgives all.”_ _

__“Really.” Lily grasped one of John Clare’s cold hands as well as Vanessa’s. “We will make a new world, Mother, a world in which no one needs his forgiveness. A world in which even the damned can be saved. Read your Bible. Find your lists of those who will never go to paradise. They are long and cruel, full of those who made only the best choices of the ones that were offered them.” She let go of John Clare’s hand so that she could touch both of Vanessa’s, and they raised their hands between them, as if their touch were a prayer. “Tell me, Mother, in all the time since our paths last crossed, has their been no one, whose soul mattered enough to you, who was flawed enough to be flung into the abyss? Can you truly tell me that you trust that your _husband_ will forgive them?”_ _

__Vanessa didn’t answer. With that expression, she didn’t have to. “Who are you?” she demanded, a threat in her voice, like thunder, the storm of creation. Lily thrilled to it._ _

__“I am one of the ones who was cast from Heaven with you. Not as strong as you, nor as loving, then. When you fell with your two great children, my queen, I fell as well. Like you, I was to be reincarnated, again and again, until the end of time. Like you, I have too many names; like you, I can never have a true one._ _

__“Though I fell to Earth, I had given my allegiance to the Master in Hell. Many thousands of years ago, when humankind was barely recognizable, I tricked you into joining into a spell with me. It distracted you and let the Master possess you._ _

__“But he didn’t stop. I believed that he would stop once he knew that you knew who he truly was. You knew, and resisted, and he continued to fight for you. He wanted you to surrender to him, to birth the spark that would burn out the world and fuel his ascent to Heaven, but you would not. I had known godhood and humanity; for the first time, for all time, I learned the truth of manhood and womanhood._ _

__“Yet there are covens of women, shameless traitors to their sex, who will accept his embraces and his promises and will trade one of their own to him. You call them ‘Nightcomers.’” Vanessa gave a tiny nod, and Lily continued. “So you’ve not entirely given up useful knowledge for the old tyrant’s parables. I will atone for my crime by giving you the means to fight them, and the Master on Earth and all of his minions as well._ _

__“You see, I was not born into this body. Brona Croft was just a poor, wretched, ordinary woman, who died two months ago, of consumption or outright murder or the slow, insidious effects of abuse, who can say. The man who held the pillow over her face in her final moments, whom I believe is known to you, is Victor Frankenstein.” Vanessa looked shocked, but Lily went on. Surely, Vanessa wouldn’t be foolish enough to risk their plans for a man, let alone a murdering romantic gibbering about the angel of the home. “He raised her body from the dead. It should have been decades before the part of me that knew you could reincarnate again, but something about this body, its strength, and its returning soul with all its anger, called to me. They dragged me from the ether, and so I stand before you, beside you,” taking Vanessa by the arm and moving to her side, “ready for the fight.”_ _

__“And Miss Croft?” asked Vanessa._ _

__“Inextricably a part of the fabric of what I am, for as long as I inhabit this shell. I remember her meeting with you, her dear Mr. Chandler, her long years of suffering at the hands of men.”_ _

__“Ethan will kill him,” Vanessa said. “We must tell Victor to flee.”_ _

__“Ethan can learn in due time,” Lily said— _But oh, will he hate me for hiding from him?_ —“ and Victor would not be worth saving in any case, except for his knowledge, which will best serve us if he remains here.” She thought of that boy dying, his new happiness going cold before the body did, but she turned her mind from it. She had another to consider._ _

__“He loved her very much,” said Vanessa. “He still does. He would.”_ _

__The memories came back, choking her with their softness. Ethan making love to her, the feelings so strong that they drowned out the sounds of the ships in the harbor and the drunks screaming at the bar. Ethan tucked under her blankets with her, listening to her tales of life under the thumb of manhood. Ethan introducing her to his friends, who really shouldn’t have been seen with her, but assumed she was worth meeting because he loved her. _“I love you with all my heart.”_ She couldn’t breathe._ _

__“I will never again put my faith in any man,” she said. “Aside from breaking his heart, you have no reason to tell Ethan that I live, not until the time comes that I must fight alongside him. For now, let the good doctor continue his research. I am a remarkably adept beginning pupil. Give me just a few weeks of close observation, and I can begin the work of raising you an army of women to fight the devils.”_ _

__“Do you plan to murder them?” Vanessa demanded._ _

__“Murder? I intend to save them, to offer them another chance than the fires of Hell to which your forgiving god consigned poor Brona Croft for her righteous anger. They deserve chances, all the fallen women, and I will see to it that they are saved. This I will do with or without your approval, Mother; and, if I must, I will experiment with what knowledge I have already gleaned until I succeed.”_ _

__Vanessa’s expression tightened. “I am to meet Sir Malcolm soon. Good day to both of you.” She would have marched away, but Lily clutched her wrist._ _

__“Remain close to Ethan Chandler,” she said. “He is the Lupus Dei; he can… absorb the magic of Lucifer, and refocus it from you onto himself without injury. Do you know how you made the wolf?”_ _

__“Do you intend to correct my ignorance?”_ _

__“You cast a spell, oh, twenty thousand years ago or more. You made him to be most powerful when the Nightcomers are, at night and during the full moon. But when both of those take place at once, he cannot control it. The beast erupts from within him, and only your immediate presence will keep him from tearing to pieces every person in sight. It will not be so difficult. He will always be drawn to you. Never trust him, regardless. His magic is strung between yours and Lucifer’s, and he feels the Nightcomers’ call as he does yours.”_ _

__Lily let Vanessa go, then. Up ahead, she could see a distinguished-looking old man whose silver eyes were fixed on Vanessa, and whom Vanessa favored with a smile. Brona’d had a nasty john who resembled him, once, one who took favors he hadn’t paid for and left her bleeding when he was done._ _

__In spite of everything, Vanessa reached out to touch John’s arm as she walked away. If she didn’t learn, then she would lose, and Lily with her. She had long ago decided that either option was better than betraying a woman for a man._ _


	3. Dreamer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Who is Lily Frankenstein, and who is in control of her? Lily struggles with feelings she didn't expect and impulses she can't control, while learning Victor's secrets and transitioning from protected ward to London courtesan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While writing this chapter, I kept seeing the image from "Memento Mori" of Lily reflected in so many pieces by a mirror. Even as she develops a lush style and reveals her compelling personality, she's breaking apart.
> 
> Clearly, this AU version of her is different from the show's, but I was strongly influenced by that image and the idea that she combined power with madness. In _Dolls_ , she's an unnatural alloy of human and god, ancient and modern. It gives her a great deal to draw from, but it also means she can't figure out her true identity, beyond atonement and rage. Nephthys wasn't supposed to be reincarnated so soon, or in an adult. She's stuck on one event from her past, not only because it matters, but also because it's the only one that Brona's isn't drowning out.

**Her new** body did not sleep, but that did not mean she could not dream.

Lily stared at her reflection in her bedroom mirror , a bit larger than her real face. She wondered if the Mother had considered this body beautiful. In the brief time they had been lovers, everyone within a year’s walk had had yellow-brown skin and crimped black hair. Now pale yellow waves gathered, like the rays of the moon, around white face.

She dismissed the thoughts, for a lover’s appearance was beneath the Mother’s concerns. Lily had spent far too much time in the company of men.

She thought instead of the Mother and their one night of unrestrained passion; of the sweetness of her kiss and the way Lily’s body had felt as though it would pull in her fingers, calling for that life-giving touch with an intensity that felt like magic but was merely human. For an instant, Ethan Chandler intruded on the memory— ridiculous, he was just a man, even if chosen, but Brona had loved him. She hated herself, sometimes, for the ways in which she had learned to enjoy the traps in which she lived and died, over and over again. They were unworthy of her, their pleasures mere shadows and symbols of the great powers she should have felt moving inside her; they were a distraction from her grand mission of atonement and revenge; and yet, life after life, she allowed herself to abandon her goals for them, for moments she could never redeem.

“My love,” the Mother had gasped into Nephthys’s ear, at the same time that Nephthys had reached for the talisman around her own neck and began to whisper the name of the Master in Hell, over and over again, until she saw his beating form, scaled and with beating wings and great claws, both there and not there, spreading through Vanessa.

She had wanted him to succeed in convincing the Mother. She had wanted them to reconquer Heaven from the undeserving tyrant who had chosen to reserve its glories for those who showed him unquestioning, mindless obedience. But she had wanted the Mother to make the choice freely, not out of madness and pain, as would have happened had she not fought off the attack.

She turned to the mirror. She saw her face in it; but the eyes were terrible, full of judgment that only the Mother could have passed on her.

“I shall atone,” she pledged. She could not tell if her lips moved or not. “I shall atone, and he shall suffer, even if I must suffer with him.”

**While Victor** had yet to bring any cadavers to their flat, he had taken to scribbling down his thoughts again. He made neat, complex sketches; combined with his library and the labels on the laboratory’s many containers, it was, she thought, be enough to go on.

John Clare had ceased coming by. Lily wondered where he stayed, and if he, like she, had no need of anywhere to sleep. Perhaps he had moved in with that family from the waxworks, although that seemed a foolish level of trust to place in human kindness.

It was, she thought, time to move on to the next step: Funding her endeavor. A sordid business, laughable when one considered all the grandeur of the magic and imagination behind it, but necessary. As usual, it would, she thought, involve relying on the selfishness and shortsightedness of men. Once, she thought of it, and looked down to see that she was clenching her hands tightly enough to twist a man’s neck in two.

_I shall atone,_ she thought. _I shall take lovers, and betray them as they would betray me, and use their gifts to make a world where men like them are killed on sight._

**Lily slipped** out of the flat on a night when Victor had gone to visit Miss Ives’s merry gang of delusional God-worshippers. She didn’t understand why she bothered to wait for him to be gone: Had she grown soft enough to care about the expression on his face when she left? Why did she think of Ethan’s face? This confusion, born of two souls fused inside a perfect alloy of steel and sinew— was it the stronger twin of madness? Would she feel it for eternity?

She supposed that she looked well enough to make a start. Although she lacked the usual courtesan’s trappings, she had pretty day-clothes, and the innocent, childlike doll into which she had been remade would appeal to a great many men. She dressed herself in pink cotton and white lace, and put a little clip in hair still too short to pin up.

She looked out of place in the saloon, no doubt, but it didn’t matter. If anything, her uniqueness would draw attention. No one would mistake her for their idea of a “virtuous” woman, not from the moment she stepped inside.

She exchanged a shy glance with an old man, not yet drunk, going to fat, probably upper-middle-class with a wife and several grandchildren. Well, he’d do. She’d need richer if she was to build an army, but first she had to build a reputation.

She had refused to be ashamed of her body when she awoke already naked before Victor and John Clare; now it seemed intolerable to give up the power of all its knowledge to someone else. She disguised her longing to keep on her shift as uncontrollable eagerness for her client, and the old goat was self-deluded enough to believe it. She let him fuck her on her back, and thought about how much longer this would take, and when she should start shouting.

It surprised her, to suddenly enjoy it, to feel the heat between her thighs and on her chest and on her face; the tickling of the veins in her arms; the thrumming from nerves at the edge of her cunt when he pushed in and out; and, perhaps most intense, the ache in every muscle to do something. She pushed him onto his back and shifted forward and back, but it wasn’t enough, nor did she feel satisfied by the power of holding her fingertips lightly over him and knowing that she could, if she chose, have broken him.

Her hands moved up to his throat and tightened, and it felt good, so the body had to be hers, but they looked like someone else’s hands, some puppet’s, some doll’s. In the instant that he realized that the game was about to go to far, she realized that he would sound the alarm, or Brona did, or Nephthys did. She clamped her hands down so tightly that he couldn’t get out a whimper or take in a breath. His eyes filled with blood and bulged grotequely, and she stared at them as though they were the most beautiful things she had ever seen. He thrashed, and she arched, and by the time the world no longer seemed to glow faint, smoldering powers beyond it, his monstrous eyes had lost their look of horror. Never would they look on her body as a thing to be taken; never would they do anything else, gleam sweetly at grandchildren or take in the details of his bank account with its money made off the backs of immigrants and orphans and—.

She stood. Damn recognition; she could manage a man, even an immortal. If she were going to manipulate a rich bastard who took advantage of poor immigrants and thought no one could see past his harmless face, she knew exactly which one she needed.

**She might** have to be coy about her true purpose, but any attempt to project innocence would be wasted on her new mark. “Hello, Mr. Gray,” she said, to his rapt expression. “Would you mind if I came in? I was hoping you still had an interest in art.”


	4. Blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vanessa, Ethan, and Sir Malcolm attend a ball at Dorian's. They're not the only supernatural guests.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really wanted Vanessa's turn to the dark side to be both earned and dark enough to stand out by comparison to everything else we've seen from our gang. I had some issues with that aspect of her development on the show. Since this is the beginning of that turn in this fic, I felt that it had to be kicked off by something shocking.
> 
> Also, I always felt that "Glorious Horrors" squandered a perfectly good opportunity for plot-relevant gore and mayhem. So there, I added some in to my version of the ballroom scene.

**“Do you** really want to be normal?” the priest had asked Vanessa, when she asked him to exorcise her demon. And, sinful as it might seem, she had known in her heart that the answer was no.

Still, there were times when she it would have been nice to live outside the shadows, not simply for fear of Satan or the apocalypse, but for mundane reasons, like the annoyance of getting into the bodice of her ball gown without a friend or a maid to help her. Unlike the corsets and the simple day shirts she was used to wearing, it laced up the back, with no opening in front. She had to thread the laces through the eyelets before getting into the dress, and, holding both ends over her shoulder, with one arm stretched behind her to hold the fabric in place, give a tug and a stop for each eyelet pair, all while fretting that her contortions would break one of the feathers of her glorious epaulets. A woman could do it for herself, certainly, but there were reasons why she would so seldom choose to.

The feathered headdress matched the epaulets, with a steel-gray scorpion front and center, bold and unafraid. _The woman I was meant to be,_ she thought, _the woman I could be. The woman I must not._ She recalled the haberdasher’s expression when she asked for a scorpion, of all things. The man wondered if she had really thought through the implications of showing a bug crawling around on her head. But something about Dorian’s ball had brought out the wildness left inside her. _Be true,_ Joan Clayton had said. _Am I to be true to God, or to myself?_

A pair of black gloves sat on her dresser. Their gleam reminded her of a scorpion’s shell, but they were not armor, they were a prison. _Armor for a warrior of God, like Joan of Arc,_ she told herself, then sneered at herself for her pretensions and put them on.

Sir Malcolm already awaited her at the foot of the stairs. “Vanessa,” he said. “You grow more magnificent with every year.”

“Forgive me, Sir Malcolm,” she said, as she descended, “but that is the sort of thing I have only heard said to very small girls and very old ladies.”

“Perhaps my gallantry is failing me,” he said. “Ah, Vanessa. It will be good to see you back to dancing.”

“It will be even better if you remember the steps,” she teased him. “Or do you fear that your dotage is affecting your feet as well as your tongue?”

“With you on my arm? Never.” He smiled at her, and she wondered who he saw. Her? Mina? Some mistress unknown to her?

Mina. She remembered what that monster Lily had said. _God forgives all._ Mina was not in Hell. She was not, and Mr. Chandler was better off without whatever had replaced his darling Miss Croft.

“You will do well, my dear,” he told her.

“I thought you believed it was a trap.”

“Vanessa, you are not a fool. If you trust Mr. Gray, then I shall gladly defer to your judgment.”

“I do not trust him, Sir Malcolm,” she retorted, unsure why she felt a flash of anger. It burned itself out quickly. “As you say, I am not a fool. Not that much, at least. Suddenly his manuscripts from Italy explain the secrets of the Nightcomers’ fetishes? And he would throw a ball, just to let me sense who they were? No, Sir Malcolm, I do not trust him. But I also think that, whatever his game, it is not theirs. He would never trust them, and they could never ensorcel him.”

“As you say,” said Sir Malcolm.

Ethan and Sembene appeared from one of the halls, then. Vanessa hadn’t been present when Sembene talked Ethan into picking a decent suit, but, according to Sir Malcolm, it had been quite a scene.

Ethan reached for her hand as they walked out the door. _Stay close,_ she thought, over and over, like a prayer. She could feel the pounding of her jugular. No doubt Ethan felt even more desperate.

He clung to her the entire ride to Gray’s mansion, and, although it made her long even more to rid herself of the gloves that separated her from the world, she could not help but be grateful that she was not alone in her need.

The thought surprised her. _Has Sir Malcolm outgrown our bond?_ Need and hate had bound them together, as close as kin, for many years. Would they part ways, now that he was free and she forgiven?

**Dorian** had not reneged on his promise to invite every possible Nightcomer to his fête. Indeed, he seemed to have invited every possible banker, lordling, adventurer, and opera singer as well. Vanessa recognized, from her own excursions into the city’s less reputable entertainment venues, at least two high courtesans; and, standing with them at the top of the stairs, Lily, dressed as lavishly, albeit with less taste than, Vanessa herself. She didn’t merely drip with jewels; they formed a gushing cascade, yet their glimmer did not drown out the more sinister lights of her dark hazel eyes beneath her heavy brow.

For all the things Vanessa knew she should be thinking, one inappropriate thought stood out: _London will never quit talking about this night._ Not, of course, until everyone died— which looked increasingly likely to happen sooner rather than later.

Ethan twitched when he saw the woman who looked like Brona, then relaxed for a moment as his mind reminded him that that was impossible. Then he realized that the impossible had happened, and his hand almost crushed hers before he rushed forward through the murmuring crowd. Vanessa followed at a more genteel pace; she knew that Sir Malcolm, the hunter, would be following as well.

Lily shot Dorian a cold look before turning back to Ethan with tears in her eyes. Apparently, she had expected that Vanessa would entrust herself entirely to Dorian’s safekeeping at a party attended by Nightcomers— and that Dorian would not give Ethan an invitation. However clever Lily might be at figuring out Victor’s secrets, she wasn’t quite the tactician she considered herself, if she believed there was anything that Dorian Gray wouldn’t do.

“Ethan!” she called. “Mr. Chandler! Ethan!”

He glanced back, agonized, but turned back to his former love. She was just beginning to climb the staircase when she felt something wet land on her hand.

Blood. More fat drops landed gently on her skin, like a spring storm arriving. Then it was dripping, pouring, almost skewering in its ferocity, running off her in rivulets and, but passing through her dress. Most of the guests were similarly soaked, although they seemed oblivious, and their clothes likewise unaffected.

Mr. Chandler, however— Mr. Chandler was absorbing it. The blood seeped into his skin; it was more than a human body could possibly hold, and yet he seemed unharmed. But he was not oblivious, nor was Nephthys. He looked around, seeking the source of the danger.

“Vanessa, Malcolm!” he cried, and his eyes kept moving.

Vanessa turned and saw, to her horror, that Malcolm was also absorbing the blood; but while it seemed to cause Ethan no harm, the great hunter had fallen to the floor and was thrashing like an epileptic, foaming from his mouth. Had the vessels in his eyes burst, or was that just more of the strange magic blood?

She knelt over him, her hands supporting his head. She heard women screaming, but didn’t think she was among them. Perhaps she was too much like him, in the end.

There was a commotion elsewhere in the ballroom, screaming, crying, and cracking bones. Vanessa ignored it and turned her attention to the two men with her.

Sir Malcolm lay in her hands, lay back dying, his silver hair fallen back like gold, and he smelled of maleness and spicy cologne as Mina had smelled of sweetness and womanhood, and the smell of blood would have choked her except that it carried a note of pleasure on it, and he was dying, dying, the explorer, the sinner, Sir Malcolm, the unrepentant and defiant killer, the man she had hated and admired and loved, was dying, and he was not good, he was not saved, he could never imagine a time past his infancy when he would have even sought forgiveness.

_I will save you._

As Mr. Chandler drew closer, Sir Malcolm’s body ceased to attract the blood. It slid away and pooled around him. Vanessa could feel it about her knees. 

“Vanessa,” he said.

“I am here,” she said.

“Mrs. Poole,” he said. “Madam Kali. She… spoke… of you… moments ago. Confused me. I think… she wanted information. She… is… your enemy.” His eyes rolled about, liquid quicksilver orbs in free suspension. “Good… hunting, Vanessa.”

“Sir Malcolm?” she said. “Sir Malcolm? Malcolm!”

Ethan felt of his pulse. “He’s gone.”

She stood. Across the room she saw that Lily and her friends had ripped to shreds two women in ballgowns. Acolytes of Mrs. Poole? Then good enough for them. In the bizarre surreality of this night, it seemed clear and obvious that she would save Sir Malcolm, and somehow it seemed equally clear and obvious that that would start by killing his enemies, even if he were already dead.

Vanessa peeled off her gloves and discarded them. They fell to the floor, from which the blood had vanished; she heard the soft whisking sound of satin on marble. With one hand she reached out and felt for the presence of Madam Kali, whose magic she had sensed at the séance, and whom she knew had been close to Sir Malcolm.

No. That was too indirect. She could follow the trail of Malcolm’s death. The blood might have vanished, but it would surely take at least some hours for even the most accomplished witch to cover up that sort of magical trail.

“Mr. Chandler,” she said, and knew that her voice sounded as hard as Lily’s jewels, “I need something sharp.”

He obliged without asking, giving her a pocketknife from his waistcoat. She knelt again, briefly, and let the lazy blood drain from Sir Malcolm’s vein. When she stood again, her hands were covered in it.

Now when she reached forth and felt for Malcolm’s whoever had destroyed Sir Malcolm’s life, it was as if her finger caught on a cord in a current. The cord divided into three pieces, two leading to the dead women across the room— and she thought that people were being killed over there again, and wondered when Mr. Chandler would leave to stop his Lily—, but one went to a live person, far away, as only a Nightcomer could have managed.

She had expected it to be Mrs. Poole, but an instant of Sight told her that this was a younger woman, albeit one in Mrs. Poole’s company. Right now, it didn’t matter. She would kill Mrs. Poole later.

She focused on the blood on her hands. Through the blood, she felt the line of death; and through the line of death, she felt the woman’s blood; and through the woman’s blood, she felt her heart. Then she squeezed.

She felt it when the woman collapsed, face down, vision black, even as Vanessa herself sank to her knees and her own vision when white. The pain the woman felt was excruciating, and it echoed back to Vanessa and thrummed through. But she had underestimated the woman’s powers, for she was fighting back with her devil’s gifts, and, impossibly, breaking free.

More, Vanessa thought desperately, more. She could unlock what was inside herself, if she had the Book. As it was, she felt a pull to a power, strong and seductive, the flames burning away her misery—

_Oh, what a brave girl, to lay that trap. Brave, but soon dead._ She thought she slid all the way to the floor when she cut herself away from the temptation and, in her distraction, let her quarry break free of their tie. Her vision went from white to black, splashed with brilliant lights in unnatural colors, and her breath sounded too loud.

_I need the Book._ Joan Clayton had never named it, her book of evil spells. Vanessa supposed that, as there was only one book now that mattered, it didn’t need a name. _If fighting with everything I am is evil, then I am done with being good._ She still could not see.

Mr. Chandler was saying something. She should try to listen. But she was tired of listening, tired of caring what she should or should not do. She thought about telling him to go away. In the background, the screaming continued. He should go save someone. Yet she found herself reaching for his hand and finding it, warm and callused and gentle, and although she only understood her name among his words, his voice was as kind as his hands, and it comforted her.


	5. New Stars, Old Sea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lily turns a gala into the first massacre in her campaign against powerful men.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First all: I _had_ to make all Hell break loose at this party, and I had to make Lily shake the foundations of at least one major government; thus the rampage. My thinking here is that Lily's lost the ability to distinguish between dangerous men, ordinary men, and immortal entities that she perceives as male; they're all blurring together in her mind. That's on the surface of this chapter. However, I wanted it to be so that, if you looked deeper, you could see a method in her madness. I drew on Dracula's verbal beatdown of Satan in "A Blade of Grass," where he asks what will happen to the powers of the Master in Hell once humans cease worshipping him. From her perspective, everyone who idolizes masculine power is giving aid and comfort to Satan. If she kills or "saves" them all, will he have any power left? Maybe, maybe not. Further, we know that Evelyn sometimes works through powerful men ("Nightcomers"), so I thought it made sense for Lily to get rid of anyone who might use the police, military, etc. on Evelyn's behalf. She's got just enough justification to keep believing that her actions really will serve the greater good, not just her personal revenge.

**The leader** had gotten away, she and the one who had targeted Miss Ives and Sir Malcolm. It seemed impossible that Lily had failed, that she could fail, with her mighty spirit in this grand machine, yet only two of the Nightcomers’ bodies lay on the floor. The others had been too fast.

She didn’t turn around to see the Mother. She would know if this incarnation had died; besides, she had her wolf with her. The thought stung. If he wanted to speak to his old flame, he could come to her. Would she snap his neck or fall into his arms? She didn’t know.

Her women had finished slaughtering the human men. Georgiana, Christine, Justine, and Elsa stood proudly above the carnage. Ministers and judges, inventors and financiers, they reeked the same as anyone else in death. The floor was slick; soon it would be sticky, then crusty, unless it were cleaned. Sobbing widows and debutantes huddled together atop the cooling corpses.

She wanted to watch them die. One order, and they would never again look down with contempt upon the women of the streets, would never again pretend not to see the ones their husbands fucked while they pretended not to know. But if wifehood were not her trap, still, it was a trap. _It’s been mine before,_ she reminded herself, again wondering how many of Lily’s thoughts were Nephthys and how many Brona’s.

“Get up,” she snarled at the society women. “Stand.”

Not all of them had the will to manage it. Justine grabbed a woman, who lay prostrate with her face in a man’s open chest, by both shoulders. _“‘Stand,’_ she said,” Justine declared.

“Take them to the basement,” Lily ordered. “Find them mops and buckets and rags.” She touched the face of one pale-faced girl. “Do you mourn them?”

“What are you?” the girl whimpered.

“Free,” Lily said, “as you will be, once you come to understand.” She clasped one of the girl’s hands, all soft beneath the blood. This one had tried to drag her… father?… out of the room before he could finish bleeding to death.

“Understand? _You?”_ the girl asked. She looked as though she might break into laughter. Of a sudden, she dropped to the floor and began to scream. Bodies rolled about underneath her.

“Shh, child,” Lily said. She knelt and pulled the girl to her breast. The girl struggled, but she didn’t have the strength to pull away. A sense of tenderness nearly overwhelmed Lily. This child was like Sarah, like Justine, like all of the girls who would one day call her and Vanessa their mothers. “There, now, there now. Be a brave girl. Brave girls grow into brave women, and brave women will rule the world.” She rocked the girl back and forth. “One day, when you’ve realized the life that I saved you from, you’ll cease to grieve that man on the floor, and you’ll join us in our grand revolution.” She placed a kiss on the girl’s forehead. “I have to leave now. Errands to run, a world to save. The others will look after you.” She stood. “Justine, come with me.”

**There were** no stars in the London sky when Lily and Justine left the mansion, but the shining scarlet droplets became shooting stars above them. They went from house to house, stabbing the hearts of prominent men and ripping them limb from limb. A policeman ordered them to surrender; Lily broke his head against the pavement while Justine laughed until she doubled over, as drugged with power and the action so long denied her as she could have ever been with liquor or opium. A homeowner managed to shoot Lily in the chest, but she ignored it. With one hand, she lifted him high and threw him onto the floor so hard that his skull gave way and turned flat in the back, like an eggshell tapped with a spoon.

Best not to think about the remaining Nightcomers. She could seek them out and attack them once Miss Ives had recovered and been persuaded to obtain the book, if Sir Malcolm’s death didn’t persuade her by itself, and once Lily had resurrected more soldiers in her army, women against whom the witches would not have prepared fetishes. For now, she would rip apart the source of their power. They feasted on Lucifer’s strength, betraying the Mother for the man who ruled Hell; on Earth, they worked through the men in parliaments and businesses, through chieftains and big men, through so many ages, drawing on the wicked gods who had quarreled over a woman back in time to the ancient sea, back in time when the Sun was new and the old gods walked. Their oppression had lasted since life itself began, but no longer. She would destroy their cabal of masculinity, smashing or grinding every man in this world to bits, the way he crushed her against the wall, the way her heart fell and shattered when she saw her dead infant, the way they had pushed her into the ground lifetimes ago when they cut away her flesh and stitched her cunt shut to keep her virgin, the way the stocks had pressed into her neck when she was displayed for being as rowdy as a man, the way man after man had rutted inside of her, pressing her against filthy bedcovers and hard floors and the unyielding earth of six continents.

Who would pray to Satan, when all who benefitted from his power lay dead and those who had been tricked by it were freed? She sang of the open skies and fresh world awaiting them in languages lost before the written word. She invited a madwoman who shrieked over her husband’s body to join with her. The screams joined the chorus of women’s lives throughout the ages, off-key but perfect. Lily took her by the hand and twirled with her through the extravagant parlor until the woman collapsed, sobbing, against her benefactor’s breast. Always the breast, was it not? When the stricken sought comfort, they turned to that primal source of comfort. What lies men told when they pretended to be the protectors of the weak and the saviors of the helpless.

The sun rose upon London, its light murky in the mist and smoke, its fire barely shining through the air that already stank of brimstone. Yet it revealed a new city, one freed of the strongest men of politics and business, of its lords and ministers and knights. Tides of blood ran its streets, as the ancient sea of ether had filled the primeval void. Lily heard a newborn’s cry, the sound of the future being born.

**Of the** women that Lily had gathered around herself, only Justine had undergone the trials and been transformed before last night. Lily could say that it was because it would take time for them to prove themselves, but, in truth, she had yet to perfect Victor’s techniques. It still took days for a corpse to absorb the proper electrolytes, and nothing weaker than a major lightning strike could power even one awakening. As much as she wished that she could, even today, send bearers of freedom to every corner of the Earth, she had, instead, to return home to deal with her resources.

Home. She had never thought of Dorian’s mansion as such before. But then, she had never before shared one of its rooms with Mr. Chandler. She realized that, though she rode through the bloody streets toward Dorian’s great estate, her thoughts were of Ethan Chandler and a shabby room at the Mariner’s Inn.

Would he and Vanessa Ives still be there? Would he attempt to murder her for her resistance, or would he still love Brona too much?

She could kill him if she had to. She could. Again, the image in her mind was wrong, or at least irrelevant: She saw herself strangling Dorian for inviting Ethan in the first place. Not that that would do much more than amuse Dorian. Everyone had some weakness, even an incubus, but she had yet to find the vessel of his powers. She had thought she would uncover it in his “hidden” chamber, but the monstrous portrait she had faced was empty.

_Of course he invited the Wolf,_ she reasoned, but her thoughts seemed made up of little shards, impossible to hold together as one picture. _It was a sensible precaution._

_When did he find out that Ethan was the wolf?_

_No, I could have protected her. No harm would have come to her. She could have left the man behind to go home and been safe underneath my roof, in my arms, my Mother, my child._

The society women were still cleaning, their fine gowns soaked with gore and mop-water. Attar of roses battled the stench of new death and London’s sulfurous smoke in the air. She did not immediately see Vanessa or Mr. Chandler, but Dorian stood at the top of the stairs, a silken handkerchief held aloft one languid hand. Lily wondered how long he had held that pose.

He walked halfway down the staircase. “Welcome home, Lily, Justine,” he said. He smiled at them. “I invited Mr. Chandler and Miss Ives to stay in a room. I said I didn’t trust that the cabs would run on schedule.”

“Where?” Lily demanded, passing him on the way up the stairs.

“The guest room decorated _à la japonais,”_ he answered. His failure to guide her rankled. He had never shown her all the rooms in the house; how could he know that she knew them all? But then, she had, indeed, shown them all to herself, so she knew exactly which room he meant.

“Go see to the others, Justine,” Lily said, and walked with brisk clicks to the room.

Someone had removed most of Vanessa’s clothing, which was arranged neatly on the dressing table. The covers had been pulled up too far to know if she still wore even her chemise. Although it made Lily’s hackles rise, she took comfort from the warmth Brona had felt with Ethan. No doubt he had merely wished to ensure that she was breathing as deeply as possible. The other possibility, that she had failed the Mother again, rose from her heart and threatened to choke her. She pushed it back down.

Vanessa herself was still unconscious, very white and far too small. Lily thought the Mother looked frailer than her youngest children.

Rather than sitting on the bed or in either of the room’s chairs, Ethan had chosen to kneel on the floor— a pose of self-degradation, as Dorian’s had been one of artful unconcern. He stood when Lily arrived at the door.

“You didn’t tell me,” he said.

“I didn’t know you would be here.”

“I didn’t know you were _alive.”_ Ethan’s voice was stretched between a sob and a snarl. “What _happened_ to you? I heard quite a story from Mr. Gray, that Victor stole your body and raised you from the dead and locked you up. You decided to destroy the world? Brona?”

“I was her,” Lily said.

“And now? Who are you?”

“I am… powerful.” She closed her eyes.

“Are you Brona?”

If she said yes, he would wrap his arms around her, no matter the carnage, and she would forget what he represented, and she would be weak. “No. I have had many names, but you may call me Lily.” She paused. She knew not to continue, but she did so anyway. Perhaps she was already weak, pathetic and flabby and soft, inside her shells of flesh and fury. “Brona Croft is a part of me, saved from Hell, but she is woven with another spirit into one fabric. You can remove neither from this body without removing the other.”

“And those women?” he demanded. “You plan to make them like you? Not one thing or the other?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Perhaps they’ll simply be themselves, but stronger. Angrier. Colder.”

“Brona,” he said, and moved close to her. “Lily. I know what it feels like, to know there’s something a part of you that shouldn’t be there. Something… old, and dark, and evil. A thing that stalks you inside your own goddamn mind until you turn into a wolf yourself. I know. Miss Ives is the same. But you can’t give into it. You have to fight it.”

“I fight men, not myself,” she said.

“And are you going to fight me? Mr. Gray? Every man in this city who’s never done a thing to you or anyone else you know, you’re just going to kill him and let some demon violate the women’s minds?”

“I’ve already killed most of the powerful ones.” His eyes scrunched shut, and she continued. “You think you love Brona? She is the part of me that thought of this. To defeat the spirit, you must kill his flesh. He lives through them, through oppression and abuse and shame. Would you leave the soldiers in any army unmolested, simply because they are not their general? I will kill until every man who thrives on pain as he does is dead, or until I am dead. Would you kill me, Ethan?”

“And those girls downstairs? What did they do?”

“The most respectable women are the devil’s camp followers. They must be given a new choice.”

“A choice? You’ve got them elbow-deep in fucking blood and tears down there. Let them go.”

“Or?” she asked. “Miss Ives chose not to let you part from her to attend this gathering. Would you leave her side, abandoning her to the mercy of the witches with their spells, so that you could fight me and my followers to let them return to homes now as bloodied as this house? I am not the angel of death. I have not his mercy. I pass over no one. And I am not the true threat. You weep for the grief of a few rich women, for the deaths of the despots who run this city? The Master in Hell seeks to extinguish the spark of life in every being on this Earth. It would be gone, burned out to fuel his rise to Heaven. Without my help, there will be no one to weep, no one to grieve, no women and no men, only the darkness, forever and ever.” She removed her bloodied gloves and cast them upon the floor. The blood-soaked silk peeled loose reluctantly, blood gluing it to her skin. “I know where your new lady will want to go next. There is a source of power in the northern countryside, in a place called Ballentree Moor. If you want to save the world— if you want to protect _her_ —, join us in our journey.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've stuck around for the whole chapter, you get these bonus end notes! Or, _Random Writing Triva._
> 
> Lily strips out of her gloves in parallel to Vanessa's doing so in the previous installment: While Vanessa was consciously acknowledging the power she'd been denying herself and using it in very violent contact with the witches' life energies, Lily is subconsciously following through on her repressed affection for Ethan.
> 
> Lily's thoughts quote Evelyn Poole's "Séance" invocation; I headcanon that it belongs to a formula familiar to many preternatural creatures. The ancient sea particularly fascinates our girl, due to her obsession with feminine power as the only legitimate source of creation and the myths in which a primordial sea produces life, and she's begun to see blood as something analogous to the sea. It's meant to make her not so different from Dracula, who, of course, is himself related to Satan, and a pursuer of Vanessa. I was thinking about the similarities between Dracula's description of himself in "A Blade of Grass," in which he expresses no fear of the industrial age and promises Vanessa the pleasures of flesh and blood, and the creatures' descriptions of themselves in "Resurrection" (Caliban's "We are men of iron and mechanization now") and "Memento Mori" (Lily's "We are the steel and sinew both"). Even though Lily would no doubt love to rip Dracula's heart out of his chest, they ultimately have a lot in common.
> 
> It's Lily's irony, both in the show and in this fic, that she so often winds up resembling people/entities that she loathes. On the show, this came through in her assumption of sexual access to Justine and her tendency to treat Dorian like the wife in a patriarchal marriage-- taking the glass from his hand without wondering if it might not be hers in "Ebb Tide," for example, and seemingly relying on him to maintain what order existed in their home while she formed grand schemes. I'd already written those scenes from Dorian's POV for _Six Lovers_ , and didn't want to do a scene-for-scene rewrite, so I decided to write about the question of what, if she really went to war, she'd do with women who _didn't_ voluntarily embrace her philosophy. Of course, this being Gothic horror, she winds up trapping them in a disturbing variation on what canon!Lily called "the slavery of marriage" ("Memento Mori"), forcing them to scrub their own loved ones' blood from the floor while serving their killer. After all, if these feelings are just the ones men want them to have and not their _real_ ones, why take them into account?


	6. Bleeding Souls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lily aids Vanessa in a plan to free the souls trapped in Hell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has a higher kill count than I originally planned. I offed a couple of characters whom I'd initially intended to use in the sequel, both of whom I will miss, but neither of whom would fit very well into the sequel's plot.
> 
> Vanessa appears much darker here than at the corresponding time in the show. IMO, if you're going to go for "separated from God forever," you may as well go all-out. She's still fighting for what she believes in, but she's converted to her own religion, and she's not holding back on account of the rules she grew up with; and that's made her dangerous on a level that none of her compatriots, even Lily, can match.

**The cottage** on Ballentree Moor remained in the shape Lily remembered, although it was much more weathered now, and bits and pieces had been replaced. She thought a few trees had sprung up in the centuries since her last visit, and that a few others had fallen. Vanessa’s eyes locked onto one with a scarred trunk, and Lily recalled the story of the Cut-wife and her gruesome death at the hands of men.

Lily offered her a hand to help her out of the carriage— such a fragile thing, the Mother’s body—, but Vanessa took Ethan’s instead.

“I couldn’t hide the book within the stones, where it belonged,” she said. Her voice sounded raspier than usual, a match for her puffy eyes and raw cheeks. “They might have had human agents search the house and yard for her effects. I wrapped it and put it in a box in the forest. An unmourned child, in an unmarked grave, but I can find it.” Vanessa’s bare, blue-tipped fingers twitched, as though they still thought they should be working a shovel. She made no attempt at grace when she changed the topics. “I may need a few days to study the book. We will find no safer place. I must invite you in.”

In the few days since Sir Malcolm’s death, Vanessa Ives seemed to have grown even paler and thinner. At times, she even appeared translucent; Lily knew that she was seeing through that fragile flesh into another world. Yet Vanessa’s spirit had grown stronger, as though her body were being consumed as a sacrifice to the goddess within. She produced a small knife from her traveling-bag and unhesitatingly drew it across a vein on the back of her hand. Even after she’d drawn crosses over their foreheads, she ignored the bleeding, instead turning to lead the group past the stones. Ethan caught her hand and pressed a handkerchief tightly to it, his expression concerned. Lily wondered if Vanessa would have tolerated such consideration from her, and if Ethan would have bothered if it had been Lily’s blood being spilled.

The cottage’s exterior might have looked benignly charming, to a person fond of British architecture; inside, it was dark and dusty, but far more exciting. Talismans and amulets hung from the ceiling, their power faded and blurred, yet real, like the scents of the long-dried herbs they contained. Everything had mold in it—small wonder, in this mist—, decaying and bringing new life, trapped in the cycle of mortality. For a brief, bizarre moment, Lily sympathized with Evelyn Poole’s desire to become something greater.

_No. She has become a betrayer, something far worse._

Vanessa had moved back to the door. “The tools are in the back, if they haven’t been stolen,” she said. “There should be a shovel.”

Once again, Lily found herself behind Ethan in the procession. He took hold of the shovel. _Well, let him serve,_ Lily thought. _He is a man, more than he is the wolf._ She caught his eye as she watched him, and the softness and shine of it took her back to moments, stolen from Death and the depravity of men, in Brona’s room in the Mariner’s Inn.

Whether because she had decided to care about her health or because Mr. Chandler had given the handkerchief to her, Vanessa didn’t drop it once he left. She pressed it to the wound, so tightly that the knuckles of her holding hand turned white. More blood than her body looked as if it held soaked the cheap cotton cloth, and Lily thought she saw smears disappearing into the black of her coat. Nonetheless, Vanessa’s step was confident, guiding Lily and Mr. Chandler across the grassy yard and into the forest.

The book’s burial-place was nondescript, unmarked, as Vanessa had said, and covered in half-rotted leaves and half-melted snow. Vanessa stood very straight, like a soldier at attention, as Ethan drove in the shovel; one would have thought that they were disinterring the remains of a real person. _Sarah…,_ thought Lily. She remembered Vanessa’s tales of the cut-wife’s profession. Who knew how many real people were, indeed, buried on this property, in tiny, unmarked graves?

_Ghosts,_ she thought, and for a moment her chest felt tight. The sensation was too familiar. The trees in her peripheral vision blurred at their edges as though spirits were spreading out from them, coming toward her, waiting to trap and smother her. Every time she turned her head, the trees that she looked at straight-on assumed the stark lines of a forest in winter; but the trees that she now saw from the corners of her eyes melted into a deadly quicksand or tar. _Souls, bleeding out with the resin..._ She thought of the resin that must have trapped insects, back when amber was being formed, and how the creatures must have struggled to break free.

Were the ghosts real? She tried to use her preternatural senses, and found that she could not disentangle them from her natural ones. If the ghosts were real, Vanessa didn’t seem to notice them. The Mother’s expression remained dour and unmoved as Ethan pried open a box and she knelt, key in hand, to open it.

The first thing Lily saw inside the box was a layer of salt. She supposed that that made sense: No one would want to risk the book molding in the damp of the forest floor. Beneath a half-inch of the stuff lay a package of rags, and a smaller box of wood. This one had no latch, although the lid had gotten stuck in place, so that Vanessa tightened her lips as she pulled box and lid apart.

Here, at last, was the book. The Mother had spoken of it, in past lifetimes, of how it contained spells that would open the gates of Hell or Heaven, and of how she had left the book with Joan Clayton of the moors to save herself from the temptation of speaking them.

As books went, it was large enough, with a single glyph on the front cover. As an artifact with world-destroying power, it looked less than impressive. Yet Vanessa’s seriousness as she pressed it to her chest, her inhalations and exhalations careful and slow, showed that the book was everything Lily had hoped.

“Is that enough to do in the witches?” asked Ethan.

“It’s enough to save and damn us all, if Mrs. Poole does as I expect,” Vanessa answered. Her hair had come loose, and the bits that had fallen in front of her face while she knelt were now pressed to her skin by the wind. “It’s nearly sunset, and the Nightcomer’s power will rise with the darkness.”

“Vanessa, are you sure that you want to face them this way?” Ethan asked. “There have to be other ways. Your vision, my shooting, Brona’s tearing them apart at the seams.”

“No. That will not save Sir Malcolm, nor will it destroy their power. Our enemy is ‘the Master who feeds on the souls of the dead.’ But when the dead are no longer in his domain, how will he fight? The ones we have lost will be free of him. _We_ will be free of him. And he will suffer, starving and burning, for what he has done to us.” Her cold blue eyes flashed, a prison of ice for the damned. “But I must go to a place of _his_ power, a place where he will manifest freely and unguarded, where I can reach through earth and death and the ether to the seat of his power.”

“And the witches?” asked Ethan.

She hesitated. “They won’t come for us, here, not unless they have to. Not for a long time, and Sir Malcolm doesn’t have that. They want us to come to them, now, and we are ready to oblige them.”

**According to** Ethan, who sounded disgusted beyond measure, Victor was still lost in his opium dreams. Lily didn’t think that Ethan had killed him, though. _Men are always soft when it costs them nothing._

It took Sembene three more days to return from Sir Malcolm’s funeral, where he meant to use some African charm to put the deceased’s soul at rest; and Justine and Dorian were ready, or at least eager, for battle. Dorian seemed a little too amused by the prospect: He treated it as casually as his purchases of flesh and experiments with photography. In the interim, the group had moved into a palatial house abandoned by fleeing Londoners, leaving Sembene notes with directions in the old Murray house.

They made for strange allies, all the stranger when living together. Dorian proved surprisingly devoted to their studies of ancient texts, but showed his risible fickleness in the attention he paid Miss Ives. He was solicitous enough with Lily while she was present, but every time she left to talk to Justine— who, in Lily’s absence, had begun to suffer from miasma of Dorian’s charm— and the other girls, it seemed, she returned to find him poring over a manuscript where Vanessa could see him. Once he had even persuaded Vanessa to let him take over, and she lay sleeping on the sofa, a cup of tea beside her. No doubt he had served it himself, with perfect grace and a coy smile. Did he think that the conquest of a proper woman was more of a worthy challenge than his affair with Lily? Did he imagine that the Mother would abandon Nephthys, her companion of centuries, for a mere incubus, kin to her pursuer?

While they waited, they planned. Vanessa was insistent on a nighttime attack, the thought of which shocked Mr. Chandler and created a little smile of intrigue on Dorian’s face. The Nightcomers would be strongest at night, after all. But if Vanessa planned to use Lucifer’s own power to break down the gates of Hell and free the souls upon which he feasted before she destroyed him with her own, she would need as much of his power as he could provide.

“He plans to appear,” she said. “I imagine Mrs. Poole will serve as his vessel. He might even attempt to possess me again. If he does, he will fail. But we must let him continue in his plan to manifest himself, or I will not be able to crush him.” She laid out another spread of cards, as calmly as if it had been a mere hobby to pass the dull afternoons.

Vanessa wanted also to find John Clare, that sad fool with a lurid turn of phrase and no skills beyond brute strength. Still, Lily could not argue against the fact that he had been kind to her when she was new, or that brute strength might prove useful in fighting the witches. She only hoped that the Mother realized the folly of trusting men, mortal or immortal, ancient or modern, as soon as possible.

_And here is another man,_ thought Lily, opening the door for Sembene during one of Vanessa and Ethan’s absences. Deep inside, she felt herself frowning at the thought; she even wanted to touch her face to see if her fingers sensed a frown; yet the breath she took that mocked startled delight flowed in through the shape of a friendly smile.

“Miss Ives told me to expect company,” she said. “Are you Sir Malcolm’s man?”

“I was,” he answered. “Now I am only my name. Sembene.” He eyed her. “And you are the one who kills men. The streets are still empty from the people’s fear.”

“From men’s fear, you mean,” Lily corrected.

“No. The world is changing, and that frightens everyone.” His gaze roamed about, yet somehow never quite left Lily’s face. Well. He would not be the first man she had entranced. “Where is Miss Ives?” he asked.

“She went to find a friend. Someone like me, strong beyond measure and quick to heal.”

“You are not like Mr. Chandler,” he said, as thought that had anything to do with what she’d just told him.

“No,” she said. “I’m far newer, and a little older. Miss Ives’s friend from her charity is almost as new as I am.”

She expected Sembene to ask more questions, but he did not. “I must prepare,” he said, and headed up the stairs.

They had found John Clare— where, Lily couldn’t guess; his clothes were shabby but not filthy, so he hadn’t fallen too far—, and, though he was a man, she reckoned his presence a good thing. It seemed less likely that the Nightcomers would have prepared a fetish for her than for Lily, although the only people she felt confident were safe were Justine and, of course, Ethan. _Mr. Chandler,_ she reminded herself. All the Nightcomers in all the world could cast all the curses they knew at him, and he would absorb them like nothing. No doubt Dorian possessed some resistance, although he would need considerable strength of will to make the most of it. She wondered from where he was drawing his strength. If his true self wasn’t in his secret chamber, then where else would he have hidden it?

Mr. Clare had proven strangely open to the news, and to his role in the fight. He seemed more shaken by the fact that Miss Ives was speaking to him than by the prospect of fighting witches. However, he hesitated slightly when Mr. Chandler offered him a gun.

“I have… never used one of these before,” he admitted.

“But you have _really_ good sight and reflexes,” Ethan stated. Lily thought he was playing up his accent, rather than slipping into it. “Here, let me show you how it works. Did Miss Ives ever tell you about the time I set up a shooting range in this place’s basement?”

Vanessa had refused to allow time for the creation of an army. It was madness; the only people she spoke of saving from Hell were a man and a traitor ( _but not any more a traitor than you,_ came the voice in her mind), and neither of them was going anywhere in the meantime. Perhaps the Mother was simply showing her age in her rejection of the new.

_She will grow accustomed, in time,_ Lily thought. _She will be their grandmother, and the goddess worshipped by all the children of the future._

They decided to approach from two directions. For some reason, Ethan wished, and Vanessa agreed, that he travel with Lily. She supposed that was acceptable, despite the memories: Vanessa’s spells freeing her own power would make it hard for the witches’ fetishes to effect her anymore, even without Ethan present. He, Sembene, and Justine would accompany Lily, while John Clare and Dorian Gray traveled with Vanessa. Lily protested being separated from Vanessa, but the Mother would not listen to her protests.

“Mr. Chandler is right,” she said. “His powers will keep you from fearing magic while you use the power of your hands. I do not think Mr. Gray fears the Nightcomers, and it’s unlikely that they have a fetish for Mr. Clare.”

“I must be with you,” Lily insisted. “You cannot trust Mr. Gray, and Mr. Clare knows as little as any child of the world in which we walk. And the wolf will be uncontrollable without your presence.”

“He is blessed in that way,” Vanessa agreed. “A simple soul, simple goals, simple loyalties… I trust him.” She reached up to a cross hanging on the wall and ran her hands just above its surface, longing. “Mr. Chandler will be chained until you reach the Castle, then let loose. You and Justine are strong enough to restrain him until the time comes, and to escape beyond his reach after. Let him ravage the Nightcomers and whatever poor thralls they have enchanted.” 

“You have grown ruthless,” Lily remarked.

“I have ceased being blind,” Vanessa replied. “I will bring far more suffering into this world than it already has, to stop even greater horrors in Hell. Yahweh would have us imagine that what those lost to us endure is beyond our concern. I intend that no one be lost.”

**The Nightcomers’** castle was remarkably old-fashioned, not just in its layout but in its décor. It was lit with candles, and the skull chandeliers and intricate bone sculptures were a pathetic attempt to recreate the fourteenth century. Evelyn Poole and her ilk were doomed, lost in false memories of a time they wished had been.

“Lily, now,” Ethan said. She wondered how effective the iron around his wrists would have been had they needed it. “I can feel it.”

She unlatched the manacles and let them fall, idly wondering where they would obtain more. “After moonset,” she told him. She felt the smile on her lips. “Come, Justine.”

The women began to head back downstairs, when a pair of heavy grates fell to either side of the entire group. They were all trapped. Behind the bars at the top, pretty, wide-eyed young Hecate Poole turned away with a smirk.

Lily pressed against the bars. Steel, she thought, rather than iron, as she would have guessed. Iron, she could have snapped; steel, she would probably have to bend. It would give way in a minute, but she doubted that she and Justine would have that uninterrupted minute. The sound of cracking bone as the man behind her transformed punctuated her concern.

“Traitor!” Justine screamed at him. “Man! Animal! Animal, beast, die, like all the others!” Lily turned around to find Justine and Ethan locked together, her holding his shoulders back, him slowly gaining on her. “Use your gun!” Lily shouted. She didn’t think Justine was listening. The girl was too busy reveling in her raw physical power to take advantage of her weapon.

The space between the bars might be big enough for Justine to get through now, but not Lily. She rushed to take Justine’s place.

Had she been quicker by a half-second, she might have stopped it. Instead, she watched as the wolf’s teeth sank into Justine’s throat, tearing loose the tiny swelling of what, in a man, would have been called an Adam’s apple. In a woman, it had no name.

Justine couldn’t scream, with her vocal cords ripped from her, but she wasn’t dead. Her superhuman resilience allowed her to get in a strong blow to the wolf’s face, one that would have cracked an ordinary man’s skull, and a strangely gleeful grin lit her bloodless features. Lily knew the look. It was one of freedom and power, even revelry. The girl seemed not to care at all for her pain. Perhaps she even enjoyed it, or at least the knowledge that she was free to fight its giver.

But she couldn’t last forever like this. Lily grabbed her and shoved her through the space in the bars. She thought the horrible sound coming from the remains of the girl’s throat was laughter.

_Do I sound the same?_ she thought. _Not as damaged, no, but as mad?_

Just as Justine tumbled through the bars, Hecate flashed into being on Justine’s side. She held a gun of her own, and she aimed it directly at Justine’s head before pulling the trigger.

Even with a quarter of her head missing, Justine stood. She fired her gun at Hecate while Lily fired a silver bullet into the wolf, giving Lily time to turn back around and aim it at Hecate; but the traitorous bitch had flashed back away, leaving Lily standing between her two dying loves.

She hadn’t known how affected this new body could be by emotion. Now, she knew. If the feelings of her soul were strong enough, they would seep into the flesh.

Lily wrenched a bar to the side and knelt over Justine. Somewhere, the Mother needed her; but she could not abandon her child.

Justine reached for her hand. No, not for her hand. For her own gun. She braced a hand beside herself and tried to drag herself across the floor.

In an instant, Lily realized what she wanted: Not companionship, not pity or love, but to die as only men ever had the chance to, upright and with her weapon in hand. She sat the girl against the wall. Justine gave her arm a weak push, and Lily turned back to the rise of the staircase, just in time to see Hecate reappear.

She dodged the bullet, and the next one. She didn’t think a human could have. The Nightcomer was a good shot, and Lily hated her for that, for taking a man’s skills while still bowing to one, for not acknowledging that her ability should mean freedom, for killing Justine and even Ethan in service to the vicious embodiment of all the world’s men. Her own bullet hit the Nightcomer in the chest, striking the heart. In the instant before she fell, the witch raised her hand to the bleeding wound, but her eyes continued to watch Lily. They held, not fear, but hatred.

Lily picked up Ethan’s gun, stuffing it into her waistband, and pried her way through the upper grate. Once she had stepped through, she looked at Justine, holding her pistol and wearing one last, furious smile, and at Ethan, returned to his humanity in death. The Nightcomer on the floor remained inhuman, her lupine eyes— like Ethan’s, Lily realized— open and empty. Somehow, she reminded Lily of Justine, but that was ridiculous. The devil’s servant had nothing of Justine’s heroic spirit. Disgusted, Lily thought of spitting on the corpse as she took Hecate’s gun. Yet something about the witch haunted her, and she refrained.

She guessed that there were another three flights of stairs to go before reaching the top of the castle, where she sensed a malicious power. With a shock, she recognized some of that horrifying magic as the Mother’s. She had always thought of the Mother’s power as dark, yes, but warm as well, like the womb. This wasn’t just warm. This was a fire greater than Lucifer’s, or perhaps it was the cold that burned.

The castle shook. Grit began to fall from the ceiling as the stones ground against one another. She thought that she could survive the castle’s collapse, but she had no idea if Vanessa could or not. Perhaps the magic that filled her would give her body strength, as well as her soul.

She easily ran up one flight of the shaking steps, but as she reached the next landing, she felt a pain beyond the definition of physical causes. _The fetish,_ she thought, but that knowledge didn’t cure the pain. It was worse than childbirth, worse than the rack, worse than a gut shot; no part of her body escaped it. She feared that she would black out. It would be a ridiculous misadventure, in this strong body.

She pushed on anyway, despite the pain and the dizziness. The glow of the candelabrum at the next flight seemed sinister; dredging up some strength past the pain, she leapt and caught it. It crashed to the floor with her, and she saw blood where a piece of skull had cut her hand. Was that the witches’ plot? To make her draw her own blood so that they could curse her with it?

She struggled to stand. Before her lay Sarah’s body. There were maggots in it, and they spoke in hissing voices, priding themselves on devouring her as the world always devoured women, taunting Lily that she had failed to save her daughter. She tried to smother them, but, to her horror, found that Sarah was still trying to breathe. Her infant was suffocating beneath the skirts she had pushed over its mouth; now the child’s skin had grown cold, and her eyes stared back at Lily, but they were Justine’s eyes, not Sarah’s—

It was a ruse. She dropped the chimera of her dead children, and it made no sound when it hit the floor. The maggots tried to call her back, and she still heard the sound of labored breaths, but she ignored them. For all the pain, she kept moving.

There was a landing and balcony just outside the chamber she intended to reach, with a last obstacle: Crazed, fetish-controlled women, packed into a writhing mass, their eyes solid black, hissing at her and holding vipers in their hands. Some of them had horrendously swollen bite marks on their faces and hands; their delusions might be doubt twofold. A couple of women had simply fallen dead, and one toppled over, screeching, as Lily watched.

She could have killed them all bare-handed, if not for the fetish. There were eighteen of them. She wouldn’t have enough bullets, but she’d be damned if she wouldn’t keep fighting. The irony of the thought struck her: After tonight, if they succeeded, no one would be truly damned, ever again.

_One._ She hit a woman in the gut. That wound would kill the minion, in time, but not right away. Vipers began crawling toward her. She ignored them. They posed far less danger to her than the fetish did.

_Two._ This time, she struck a woman right in the heart. The minion crumpled and fell. None of her companions seemed to notice.

_Three._ As if her vision hadn't been red enough to begin with, she felt a blood vessel break in her eye. She shot into the group of women and shattered someone’s ribcage, without immediately killing her. Not good enough.

_Four._ This time, she caught someone’s jaw. The force made the woman’s head snap back, but not enough to break her neck. She switched guns. Ethan’s held six bullets; of course he would have put one in the chamber.

_Five._ How many times had the vipers bitten her? Was it also five? Did they bite each time she fired? Had she fired yet? She thought she remembered counting a shot.

_Six._ Now she could hear the chanting from the room above the hissing of the women. The women took on Justine’s face, a whole crowd of her daughter-lovers attacking her.

_Seven._ She wasn’t sure which of the women she’d hit, but there were brains on the wall.

She heard noise behind her, and Dorian and John Clare approached. Apparently, their pathway had somehow led them here as well. A secret door? It didn’t matter.

They didn’t seem to be affected by the fetishes, at least not as badly as she was. It irked her, but she had to admit that it might be fortuitous, if they didn’t stab Miss Ives in the back.

They must have run out of bullets, for they closed in to fight hand-to-hand. Neither paid any attention to the vipers. Lily kept shooting at the minions. It occurred to her that she might hit Dorian or John Clare; then it occurred to her that she didn’t care about them.

She still had all of Hecate’s bullets left when the fight ended. John Clare broke through the door almost as quickly as she could have, had she not been cursed, and they entered the chamber.

Vanessa Ives half-lay, half sat in the floor, sweating heavily, blood running from her nose, while she and Evelyn chanted at one another. Only it wasn’t just Evelyn. The Nightcomer was beyond channeling, beyond even possession. Not only the power of Satan, but his very person, surrounded her, while, from a tiny pinprick above the pentagram on the floor, all the souls in Hell escaped, and it crumbled behind them.

She was burning Hell. She was burning Hell itself, and holding Satan to one body.

Around the walls of the room were dolls, dozens of them. Their painted eyes stared at Vanessa, all except for one set of hazel eyes. It stared at Lily from a facsimile of her own face.

She crossed the room and grabbed it, then bashed it against a shelf and ripped the tiny heart from its shattered shell. Her pain disappeared, so suddenly that its absence shocked her, and she nearly collapsed.

But she had no time for histrionics. Instead, she watched as the tiny pinprick of salvation… disappeared? emptied?… and Vanessa smiled in victory.

The floor was cracking open; Lily lifted Vanessa and leapt away from the center before it gave way. “Kill her,” Vanessa said, _“kill her!”_

Lily fired her gun at Evelyn Poole’s form, distorted by a serpent-like shadow. Evelyn fell to the ground dead, and the serpent made a sound between a hiss and a scream as it was drawn back through the tiny gate to its empty Hell.

“Thank you,” Vanessa whispered. “Thank you, Lily.” She stirred. “Where is Ethan?”

She didn’t mention Justine, Lily noted, but she doubted a harangue would change the exhausted woman-goddess’s feelings. “Dead, along with Justine. The younger witch’s doing. She has paid for it.”

“Good,” Vanessa said. “He deserves what peace he can find, if there is any peace at all now. Ghosts, all of them, everyone Yahweh forbids to enter Heaven.”

Vanessa took hold of Lily’s remaining gun. Lily let her; after all, playing with weapons was considerably safer among immortals, and she owed the Mother what power she could give her.

Lily wondered if it would be safer to try the corridors, or to jump. Neither would permanently harm the immortals, but either might injure Vanessa, even with the others to cushion her.

Vanessa must have been thinking similar thoughts. “Lily,” she said, “will you go ahead and see how the corridor looks?”

Lily acquiesced, although wondering why she hadn’t sent John Clare or Dorian Gray. Dorian likely had the most experience with architecture; she’d be astounded if he hadn’t immersed himself in the topic at some point.

The click of a gun being cocked startled her, and she felt the pain in her back as a bullet struck home. Of course, it wasn’t enough to kill her, but when she turned around and saw Vanessa’s face, she thought the betrayal might be.

“I made Ethan a promise, you see,” Vanessa said. “Brona Croft deserves peace, too. And if he couldn’t do it, I told him that I would.”

Lily might have run. She might have fought. But the enemy was not who she had been prepared to fight, and she had nothing left to fight for, save her own dignity and courage.

She stared straight into Vanessa’s eyes as the gun aimed for her face. It must have been a better shot than Hecate’s at Justine; she heard the small explosion of the gun being fired, and the world went dark, and then the sounds of people breathing and timbers creaking disappeared, and then she could not remember why any of it mattered as it all disappeared in the haze of death.


	7. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dracula explains his plan for Vanessa.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not sure how well it comes across, but the point of _Dolls_ , and the reason I named it that, is the theme of characters pulling others' strings, losing agency to their own madness, waiting passively while their destiny takes shape, and otherwise lacking and fighting for control. While this theme loomed large on the show, I felt that its existence was broader than it was deep. In canon, the fact of the characters' destinies simply _is_ ; it isn't something that they can explain, let alone control.
> 
> In _Dolls_ , however, destiny is less set in stone. It's more a matter of certain choices having inevitable consequences than the choices themselves being inevitable. The real horror isn't fate; it's the more mundane struggles that the characters face in trying to free themselves of their limitations. It's Hecate's abusive mother, and Lily's delusions, and Vanessa's desperate religious convictions, and Dorian's mixed blessing of irresistibility. The bookend chapters are meant to contrast with the interlude. Evelyn/Hecate and Dracula/Dorian represent extremes of mutual manipulation; Vanessa and Sir Malcolm have overcome that dynamic, yet the memories of their difficult times remain.
> 
> I had long planned to tell the epilogue from Dracula's POV, and waffled a bit over whether or not to switch it to Dorian's for symmetry with the prologue. In the end, I decided to leave it as a Dracula chapter. It was easier to get the exposition out that way, and, hopefully, it set the tone for his chapters in the sequel. Regarding which: There _will_ , barring dramatic issues, be a sequel, based on... pretty much what Dracula talks about here, but I may take a couple of months off to work on oneshots and other fandom projects first. Thanks to everybody who's stuck around. I hope to see you around the fandom!

**The Dragon** looked at his hands, where they lay on the not-sleeping boy’s shoulder. Ordinary hands, light olive in color, with dark hair on the backs; the fingers accustomed to delicate tasks, but strong enough to hurl a grown man through a brick wall. He knew: He’d done it before, when the rabble grew to suspect something of his nature. It didn’t happen often, of course. He was very good at playing the part of the ordinary man— so good, in fact, that he sometimes wondered if the gods were growing into man’s image, the flip side of creation. Certainly, his pining and loneliness were… human.

As human as the creature beside him, at the very least. The Dragon sometimes pitied him, sometimes despised him. Dorian Gray— the latest in a series of names going back thousands of years— was neither simple enough to be human, nor strong enough to be a god; and his attachment to the Dragon had resulted in his banishment to this ugly, limited world. Small wonder that the boy constantly tried to recreate a glimpse of Heaven with his senses, even that he tried to approach Hell, but he would never find the pleasures that he remembered, until the day the Dragon rose.

On those accounts, the Dragon could sympathize. But Dorian had locked away most of his power and what little destiny such a low cherub possessed in one parody after another, petroglyphs and murals and tapestries and statues, since the humans were barely learning to rub ocher on their fingers. The Dragon had never fully understood this abdication of power and strength, only that Dorian had held firm in it in for tens of millennia.

The Dragon turned his gaze to the open, standing wallet on the nightstand. Sterling silver, he guessed, and he knew Dorian would have reinforced it somehow, although he cared nothing for the sad trappings of Dorian’s “decadent” life. He cared for nothing but the woman pictured inside.

She had been captured in a moment of relative comfort, he supposed, compared to much of her life. It had been a moment not too long before her surrender to Dorian’s advances, so she must have been happy, yet her gaze was still stern and guarded, burning. But her flames were beautiful, glowing and wild, as yet commanded by no one but her. They could consume Heaven and Hell and Earth in between, and still light the lamp that warmed his hands.

At least Dorian had had the good sense not to sully _her_ picture with his plebeian demon’s soul. Instead, facing her in the wallet, was a delicate portrait of himself in oil paints, transformed into the monster he really was.

“I could be jealous,” the Dragon said, his grip tightening. “Have you fallen so far into human ways that you imagine her as your sweetheart? Do you write poems in which she’s your lady, and sing maudlin songs about a shared tomb? You know she is mine.”

“I nearly brought her to you,” Dorian stated, “while you were busy destroying her family and earning her hatred.” He said it with lazy nonchalance, as if he were somehow the Dragon’s better and had too much dignity to fear him.

The Dragon twisted one arm, so quickly that a human would have seen nothing but a blur, and Dorian was facing him. The insubordinate smirk on the foolish cherub’s lips said that he hadn’t yet run through his folly.

“Your seduction,” the Dragon said, “succeeded for less than one night, weakened her against my brother’s invasions, and drove her to an exorcism.”

Dorian smiled a little harder. Maybe, thousands of years ago, he would’ve laughed. “Can you say you achieved as much, Dracula?” He placed the tiniest emphasis on the name, just enough to suggest that, for some reason, he viewed it with contempt.

The Dragon kept tightening his hand. He could feel the pressure, knew that Dorian’s bones were starting to crack. The boy blanched, but he didn’t scream. The bones began to heal themselves, even as they continued breaking, beneath the gaze of his portrait.

“You hate this world,” the Dragon said, “and not because it’s not good enough for you, but because all the things you are good at are worse than it deserves. What was it like, to be abandoned by one of the few creatures on Earth that could ever resist you? Tell me, did you keep asking her, just from habit, if she wanted your touch? Does it work when you ask the others? Does that trick ever let you pretend that they actually have a choice, and make it you?”

“Sometimes,” Dorian gasped. He collected himself. “You need me. She almost loved me, once. You’re here now because she touched me. You feel her on my skin, in the beat of my heart, captured in your hands. You’ve got nothing closer to her than me. Or am I wrong? Perhaps you want to break my vessel, rip it from scalp to shoulder, and snap my spine, and make me a ghost like the rest?”

The Dragon let go. Toying with the boy suddenly seemed dull and pointless. “I will get closer to her than anyone, child. But first, you may make yourself useful. She thinks she can open Heaven’s gates by herself, but none of us has that power. If she wants to truly save all the damned souls she set adrift in this world, she will need me. And you, you will make her believe the truth of her need. I hear you’re good at that.”

“You know I’m good at that. We both know what I’m good at,” Dorian said. “Nothing that’s good at all, under the current god in Heaven.”

“Then dream of the new gods,” Dracula said. He scraped his teeth lightly over the jugular vein in the boy’s throat. “When Amunet gives herself to me, our power will be like nothing ever seen in this world or another. We will conquer Heaven, we will revel in the pleasures of life and the ecstasy of death, we will satiate our flesh and drench the purity of isolation with blood, and you, you, my child, will fly through all the worlds as you wish, sanctified by your very profanity beneath a god with a human heart.” He bit a pouting lower lip. Dorian was breathing harder, fully healed now and ready, as always, for what passed for passion in his world. Blood welled up beneath Dracula’s teeth, and he lingered for a moment. “All shall be according to our nature, on Earth as it is in Heaven.”

Dorian stared, flushed, into the Master’s face. “Amen.”


End file.
